Dr. Kreeft on Religion and Sex

Back in the mid-1980s I was a student of noted philosopher and author Peter Kreeft while attending an east coast seminary. I”ve been blessed to have had many outstanding teachers through the years, but Dr. Kreeft had the incredible gift of being able to make even the most abstruse philosophical concepts accessible to everybody.

Today I stumbled upon the transcription of a talk he gave last fall at the national convention of the Catholic Medical Association. His topic was to show the profound connection between religion (i.e., Christ) and sex to a culture of sex addicts. His presentation was part theology of the body, part commonsense philosophy and social commentary, and it was all vintage Dr. Kreeft. It”s one of the best articles I”ve read in a long, long time. Here”s how he opens his discussion:

“To see that the Sexual Revolution has been radical in thought as well as behavior, just look at the revolution in language. When people use the word ”morality” today they almost always mean sexual morality. That’2012-04-24 18:32:12′s a remarkable new development, an astonishing narrowing; it”s as if we started to use the word ”state” to mean only Russia, or the word ”technology” to mean only ”computers.” The reason for the new development is obvious from my two comparisons: sex, Russia, and computers are where there have been the most radical revolutions.

“No one speaks of a revolution in any other area of morality. No one speaks of the Property Revolution or the Bearing False Witness Revolution. In fact the rest of the natural moral law is pretty much still in place. Almost no one defends terrorism, sadism, cannibalism, insider trading, nuclear war, environmental pollution, rape, hypocrisy, torture, or murder. We are still ”judgmental” about those things. But if it has anything to do with sex we dare no longer be ”judgmental.””